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THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ALGY
by Algy Cluff OBE
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In an earlier book review for the Grenadier Gazette in 2021, I wrote about Algy, a familiar figure to many of us. He sits at his desk in the study at home, his study for more than fifty years, writing and gazing out over the White Cliffs near Dover, only two hundred yards from the sea, surrounded by a large library of books (there is a section devoted entirely to PG Wodehouse). There is a collection of art, he attends to the trials and tribulations of owning a vineyard of about nine acres (he cannot find home-grown pickers anywhere to harvest the grapes), he is seeking out new projects for the Remembrance Trust and running various companies at home and abroad, with their attendant hordes of expectant shareholders to manage. Well, nothing much has changed!
Algy Cluff was born in 1940, as a boy his imagination was captivated by hectic tales of derring-do in the novels of John Buchan and so, in the flush of youth and somewhat naturally, he was commissioned into the Grenadiers in December 1959. Initially, he joined the 3rd Battalion in Wellington Barracks, recently returned from Cyprus and shortly to go into suspended animation. Algy, a tall young man was, unsurprisingly, Ensign on the Queen’s Birthday Parade in 1960, and would then go on to the 1st Battalion before serving, rather more actively, with the Guards Parachute Company in Borneo.
He left the Army after six years and since has enjoyed a successful business career. A pioneer of North Sea oil exploration, he founded Cluff Oil in 1972. This led to the discovery of the Buchan Field. There followed thirty years of exploration and mining in many parts of Africa, including the development of gold mines in Zimbabwe, Ghana, Burkini Faso and Tanzania. He remains active in the oil business and he is still seeking out new mining projects. Algy was also proprietor of The Spectator for five years, its Chairman for a further twenty, and he was the proprietor of other magazines as well, including Apollo and the Literary Review.
A shrewd observer of people, he has lived all over the world and in his books, this is the fifth, he writes about the extraordinary cast of characters that he has known and all the adventures he has had. In this volume, amongst many amusing stories, you will discover why Ian Fleming never achieved his heart’s desire, delve into the Guinness Affair, parachute into the Macedonian Gap, and marvel at the fast and louche life of the ‘Peter Pan of Mayfair’. These pages encapsulate Algy’s gift for observation and storytelling. The book starts as it means to go on, it is dedicated to ‘my three admirable and formidable sons, Harry, Philip and Charlie, with a combined height of twenty feet’.
This, and the other volumes, are a wonderful, chuckle-inducing tonic, a sound alternative to watching another mind-numbing Netflix box-set. We must hope for more from the desk on top of the cliffs.
James Gatehouse
Cluff & Sons
Available on Amazon |
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